Pereira Maintains, by Antonio Tabucchi

A weird slight thing of a novel about life in fascist Portugal in 1938.

This was good! I'm not sure what to say about it. It's got an almost chant-like quality at times; a weird detached wispiness, a voice from a distance, in a weird and interesting way.

In other ways it's an unusually-realistic look at how people respond to slowly-roiling social pressures. I've long wondered what I would do if my society became intolerant or autocratic or just in some way seemed to me to be going totally wrong. Then I found myself in early March 2020 in a place where masks were not yet prevalent, going into a supermarket with a mask on, and being looked at by strangers. To my memory they didn't even look angry, or suspicious, or anything -- it was just kinda notable at the time, and they noticed me, and I projected my own feelings of otherness onto them.

After five minutes I took the mask off.

At that time I thought masking was important, that everyone should be doing it, that it might help me not catch an (at the time) alien and unknowably-dangerous disease. And yet... I couldn't stand up to 5 minutes of the absolute mildest social pressure about it. Or not-even-social-pressure, merely.... social awareness.

In that moment I basically felt that if my society ever went evil I would put up not the slightest bit of fight, I would be yet-another person who jumped off the moral cliff because all their friends were doing it.

My friend E said this is wrong, that your response to mild social pressure is not a good indicator of your response to active social enforcement, and that you can be the kind of person who feels awkward bucking mild social expectations but would still stand up to active, enforced evil. I don't know, really? It could be true, it could be not-true, I pray to God I'll never find out.